It’s not quite yet the new Berlin, as some have whispered, but a tipping point might have been reached as Australia’s sixth-largest city is being reimagined to embrace a very different future.
Not that Newcastle can ever escape its industrial past. Coal will forever occasionally wash on to its beaches from exposed coastal seams, while Newcomen Street, Bolton Street and Watt Street in the city centre salute 18th century giants of power generation. And though there’s no Pitt Street, there is a Pit Street.
